Question: What did marine biotechnology involve and how could it be applied in the workplace?

Robert Bowles answered on 11 Nov 2014:

Biotechnology is the use of living systems and organisms to develop or make useful products or modify other products. Good examples of this you may have heard of include brewing which uses yeast (a living microorganism) to produce alcohol to using fungi to produce antibiotics.
Marine Biotechnology just means you use an organism from the sea, or a salty environment. So for my PhD I used a microorganism that lives in mangrove swamps to produce DHA, which is an omega-3 polyunsaturated fatty acid. This is an oil, which is found in fish oil and can be used to treat heart disease and is also put into baby’s formula milk as it is essential for baby’s brain dvelopment. The problem is that harvesting fish for fish oil isn’t sustainable and the oil is never consistent in it’s quallity. So we were looking to grow the organism in controlled, sustainable conditions to reduce the need for harvesting fish from the sea.